Saturday, March 12, 2011

Ladies and gentleman, presenting... my dinner! :P

So I swung by Penang Place last night with the intention of passing some stuff to J, and ended up being (happily) force fed dinner. Succulent chili crabs, crispy fried mantou and Penang hor fun were just some of the delicacies on the magnificent buffet spread available!

Warning: This review might be biased - I do know the wonderful family running this restaurant after all :P but i'll do my best to give a fair review while giving the food the justice it deserves :D

Penang Place has been proclaimed as having the best Penang Char Kway Teow by the Business Times, and I managed to secure myself a steaming hot plate of it when it got served. Delicious! None of that cheap pork lard taste here. The kway teow was soft and chewy - the al dente version of spaghetti. I'm not much of a connoisseur for char kway teow, but the taste, I like :D

However, the icing of the cake for me was the chili crabs! For those who know me well, you'd also know I'm a huge fan of crabs. All kinds of crabs. And this chili crab was the best I've eaten in a long long while. Now, I'm the kind of person that usually only eats Sri Lankan crabs. Yes, I'm picky. I think huge Sri Lankan crabs have wonderful, sweet meat with a certain flavour that is hard to replace. It doesn't take a lot of skill to bring out the sweetness in those crabs - just steam them for the right amount of time and you're ready to dig in! But the secret of Penang Place's crabs lay in their sauce - Bursting with flavor and taste, spicy but not overtly so, it brought out the natural sweetness of the meat and made it succulent and juicy. I still missed the firm and chewy texture of the Sri Lankan crab meat, though. But the sauce - better than Long Beach, I say! Don't forget to mop up the gravy with a crispy piece of fried mantou, and lick the plate clean afterwards when nobody's watching!

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me, and my crappy phone's grainy camera resolution wouldn't have done it any justice. Or perhaps it was fortunate, because i was too busy eating to think about photos till i was almost done, anyway. Will grab photos next time and tag the Stockholmers in it :P

But what I really appreciate about Penang Place is the family that runs it, and their motivation behind running it. This place offers the best customers service I've seen, especially for a restaurant. The staff are friendly, polite, and genuine, and the place holds an overall homely feeling to it.

What's more, Penang Place contributes a large percentage of their profits to the needy. And this isn't lip service. It isn't CSR. It's the very reason behind why Penang Place was opened, to begin with.

So what's better than having a delicious, affordable buffet and leaving with your tummies full and satisfied?

Having a delicious, affordable buffet that leaves your tummies full and satisfied, while knowing that much of the profits made from your money went to a good cause!